Global Trends: Investment Flat in 2025, But 2026 Looks Bright
The year-end data is now in globally, and unfortunately, it’s not a great story for Canada.
While 2025 was a year of recovery for commercial real estate investment across many parts of the world, Canada remained relatively flat. Markets such as Argentina, South Africa, Turkey, and Vietnam experienced strong rebounds in transaction activity and investor appetite, while Canada continued to lag behind.
There is clearly a global recovery underway, yet Canada has struggled to regain momentum. The country remains absent from many of the major international rankings for cross-border capital flows and most active investment markets. This is not simply about missing out on major data centre transactions or the return-to-office recovery cycle. It also reflects broader structural issues within the Canadian market, including slow repricing and lenders continuing to extend maturities rather than forcing assets to reset to current market conditions.
However, 2026 has started on a much more encouraging note.
Across the country, we are already seeing significant transactions taking place:
- Downtown office towers trading above $100 million
- Large mobile home park portfolios changing hands in Western Canada
- Enclosed shopping mall transactions
- Sale-leaseback transactions involving automotive dealerships
- Multi-billion-dollar retail REIT mergers
- Major retail plaza acquisitions in Québec anchored by strong national tenants
What makes this particularly interesting is that this renewed activity is occurring without meaningful interest rate cuts. Inflation remains present, oil prices continue to stay elevated, and uncertainty surrounding tariffs, geopolitics, and international trade agreements remains very real.
The reality is simple: nobody in commercial real estate can wait forever. Landlords, lenders, institutional funds, private equity groups, and tenants eventually need to transact. After several years of slower markets driven by rising interest rates, quantitative tightening, tariffs, and broader global uncertainty, there is now significant pent-up demand building throughout the market.
In many ways, the industry appears to be entering a new phase. Capital that remained on the sidelines over the last few years is slowly beginning to reposition itself. Investors are once again looking for opportunities, and quality assets continue to attract attention despite the broader uncertainty.
Timing will likely become one of the most important drivers of value creation over the next 12 to 24 months. The groups that understand where the market is heading before broader momentum fully returns will likely be best positioned moving forward.